Concept Statement

Revival: bringing to activity and prominence

(restoration and adaptive re-use of Revolution mills)

Living: animation, still in active use, surviving

(human presence and influence)

Biomechanical: application of mechanics and machinery knowledge to the structure of living things

(relationship of cotton/railroad machinery tasks worked in conjunction with human beings)

System: instrumentality that combines interrelated interacting artifacts designed to work as a coherent entity 

(the entirety of Revolution Mills)

"Revival of a Living Biomechanical System"

Do "living" and "biomechanical" repeat the same information? 

To be developed further.

Obama/Biden Rally

My girlfriend found out Obama and Biden were having a rally in Greensboro a few days in advance to the official printing in the newspapers. We both had a lot of work to do for school but she made plans and drove from Durham (Duke) after class on Friday. We said to ourselves, this is our chance to go to our first political rally (presidential)...why not? We had originally planned to wake up at 6am but instead of setting my alarm for weekends, I had it set for weekdays (cellphone) and we slept until about 7:15. I think if we hadn't gotten there so early we wouldn't have had such a close spot next to the stage, which was about 20 feet away (give or take).

At first we didn't think we were going to get in but after I saw all of the people pile up behind us in line I wasn't worried anymore. One woman in the senior citizens line passed out on the sidewalk and had to be taken away on a stretcher by emts'. It was amazing to see people were willing to sacrifice their bodies to be a part of this rally. Everyone was out there, all ages and all races. Everyone was willing to stand for hours to see these men speak about their beliefs and goals for the future of our country.

I ran into my friend Susie who was by herself. Susie had brought a book to read while she stood in line. I had my camera and my girlfriend to converse with but made a mental note to bring a book or sketchbook the next time if I was ever by myself for one of these.. She was actually one of two friends that I know of that came by themselves. It made me proud to have friends like this, people who care about whats going on in this country. I wonder how many other people came by themselves...
The rally itself was pretty exciting. Both Barack and Biden showed a fierceness that energized the crowd at some points. It reminded me of the quote "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" After watching the debate the night before I imagined they would talk about much of what was already said but there was new material with an added mix of humor. The crowd responded well to the Democratic candidates. I believe the news put the total number of people at the rally around 20,000. I'd say thats a suprisingly substantial showing for Greensboro and brought hope in my heart for what was to come on November 4th.
"....We are fast approaching the time when we will have to think even further outside the box, remove our ideological blinders, and look directly at the problems of this century--and fashion our solutions so that they address the problems, not confirm our beliefs...."

Come up with solutions to address the problems, not confirm our beliefs...sounds like change to me.

Vertical Review

After meeting with Christina and Kelsey to have conversations about the process we've achieved so far, I noticed similarities between all of our projects. The use of the basement as either food or vendor space, Buffalo Creek as a major element of the design, and multiple floor levels open to each other were all major ideas in our projects. It was nice to see my peers' process before a final review for once. Not that this interaction doesn't happen between some of us but we all have our friends and clicks of people that we normally go for advice and feedback from. Maybe this atmosphere will pop up by itself a little more often without Suzanne having to tell us to do it! The blogs definitely make accessing other people's process easier but not everyone constantly updates their site so occasions like this should more than offset that problem (meeting in person is probably better). On to business...

So...I had a vision quest last night. I don't remember what it was but for some odd reason I knew the direction I wanted to head in when I woke up this morning. I didn't have much to show besides a page of sketches, diagrams, and the graphics I posted earlier. Looking at the looms, I started thinking of the cotton that went through to weave whatever product was being made. Suspension, connection, inanima: three words I've been thinking of. The graphics got me ideating about how to make things float or suspend in mid-air (sounds familiar to another project I did last year...Noah's Arc).

I've decided to split the project area into 3 major areas: stores, creek/courtyard, and food (building across the creek/courtyard). I see the floating/suspended structure as serving a similar purpose to the diagonal shaft that already exists between the buildings, as a purposeful connection. Whether this entity becomes an actual restaurant, store, gathering area, or strictly circulation on a different level remains to be sought out and processed. Only good things can come of it. The creek/courtyard area will act as the spatial connection between the store and food buildings. There are also many opportunities for using the creek as a visual element from inside at the basement level and perhaps other levels as well. I should also say that I am one of those people that plans on cutting the building up but not just the basement. I want to cut through the floors above our "space" to open each level to a yet to be determined "skylight." The quotations are there because it will serve more purpose than just providing natural light.

I'll continue this later, when I have my stuff scanned in.

Roll with the changes...

After much deliberation and processing, it seems I will be putting off graduate school for another year. There is no big reason, just many small reasons that have weighed heavily upon my head.

#1. 5th year summer studio lasts the entire summer, overlapping with 3 year graduate architectural programs which start in the summer.
#2. I only need 5 more Geography classes to attain a double major. By finishing this, I increase my chances of acceptance to a graduate Planning program. This also means I am not limited to design jobs (graphics, interiors, engineering, architectural, etc) and it opens up the government job option (planning, consulting, etc). Taxpayer money is the best kind of money...just ask the banks and lenders the government is bailing out...haha.
#3. I have not had time to study for the GRE this semester and at the going rate, I don't plan on ever having time. I've only got 12 credit hours and my tuesday/thursday schedule is open but I find myself either reading for Geo 502 Urban Planning or processing work for studio during what were planned to be my GRE study times.
#4. I've always dreamed of getting my graduate education outside of the home state but my search for schools elsewhere has also made me more aware of how wonderful North Carolina's school system is in comparison to others. In state tuition would save me tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars (depending on where I go). NC State and Charlotte have Architecture, UNC-Chapel Hill has Planning. The education I'm striving to get is available in my own state and its cheap in comparison to other options.
#5. Kaylin. I'd like to be close to my girlfriend. Shes in Durham going to school at Duke. Its hard to admit but there is a high possibility I might be miserable being hundreds of miles away from her. She says I shouldn't base my decision on her and as I already stated in the beginning of this post that each of these by themselves wouldn't be reason enough to stop my rampage to graduate school...but as a whole, they present a very tight case.

Yeah, I think I've made my decison.

Nothing like a little apophysis with a mix of inspirational quotes from folks who are no longer living...

I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel/trash heap to find anything that will get me slightly enthused. I credit my lack of mental functioning to the stress I've been feeling from all the crap thats been going on. So, today after making some "motivation" posters with a tool I haven't touched in a while I picked up the charcoal and began drawing. I find that whenever I feel a lack of creativity, a change in media has a tendency to jump start the process. The image below was part of the search on google for technical drawings of looms and locomotives although the quote is mine. As for the others, I created the images and swiped the quotes from some random website. How uninspiring...I'm so uninspired my eyes won't even stay open and my brain wants to shut itself completely off. I need food. I need caffeine. I need to leave school.

Revolution Mills: we have a problem.

As my fellow group members have already discussed (on their blogs) to some extent our conversation we had earlier today, I don't feel the need (but will do so anyway) to elaborate further other than to reiterate that the inspiration wall, while beautiful, doesn't really have anything to do with the mill. Aside from the envelope of the building, the remaining structure and Buffalo creek, nothing there was in anyway what we would consider to be an official artifact of the original cotton mill. The situation certainly poses a critical question:

Do we take inspiration from the character that the building exists in today or do we take it from the sources available to us via old photographs, drawings, history books and a delorean with time travel capabilities complete with flux capacitor?

It would be awesome to go back in time (I'd be weary of the future...) and investigate this place when it was in full production mode. Talk about some amazing photography content. Anyway, we have opted for looking elsewhere for inspiration and mean no offense. It should be noted that we are trying to be critical of our design process and I am glad that my group had this pow-wow.

Apparently someone recommended a designer/architect to Jami. I can't remember his name but needless to say it was the kind of inspiration we needed. I'll get back to that later. For now I leave you with some inspirational pictures of looms and trains. Why looms and trains? Seeing how the railroads played an integral part (no pun intended, you'll see) in transporting cotton to the mill and the finished product to consumer centers across America it seemed fitting to include them. Not to mention, if you look at the pictures/drawings, the parts of the looms and steam locomotives seem to have an odd similarity...




Interesting....huh?

Ugh...

I've recently found it difficult to prep my brain for creative work with all of the problems going on in our country right now. Years ago it was the current administration's rush to capture the "wmds" and oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq. They had everyone up in arms and scared for their lives like it was going to be their last days on Earth.

Fast forward to the present day, $700 billion later (one of the estimations for the total cost of the Iraq war: the number is fitting for this situation for comparison), and I am witnessing the same scare tactics by the same administration about the financial crisis this country is facing. Treasury secretary Hank Paulson is asking for $700 billion, American tax payer dollars, to bailout the failing banking/lending/financial institutions who have gone unregulated for years instead of letting them declare bankruptcy. Mr. Paulson claims that this would be devastating to the economy: recession, millions of jobs lost, decrease in GDP, and credit would cease to exist. He paints a picture of armaggedon.

The aspect of this situation that irritates me the most is the fact that the people who are saying "there is a crisis, we need the money ASAP or the economy will shred itself, etc, etc, yada, yada, yada, etc" are the same people who said everything was fine last week. How do we go from "everything is ok" to "economic armaggedon"? I find the timing of the revelation of this "crisis" suspicious since Congress (the body responsible for legislating US budgetary expenditures) will be adjourning in a few days so that everyone can go home to campaign for local/state elections. Mr. Paulson had a plan ready before he even came out to talk about it: $700 billion (free money), no oversight, no regulation, no transparency, and no strings attached to bailout the financial institutions.

The way I see it, this was all planned. Any senator or congressman who is the least bit humane would say no to voting for such bill, especially since the money would be coming from the people who elected them. Since they are adjourning soon for campaign elections and you've got a high ranking government official, Paulson, panicking and telling us the world is going to end (using the same scare tactics used so often and so deceivingly by this administration) we have the United States legislative branch running around like the Capitol Building is on fire scared into thinking that if we don't sign away this $700 billion its all going to collapse.

Surprisingly, there have been those that have raised their hands and said "but what do the people get out of this? How does it benefit them?" These are the good senators and congressman, republican, democrat, and independent alike, who have hearts, and use their power for the will of the people for whom they were elected for. They will be tagged as officials who don't care about the people, as the ones who dragged their feet for "political reasons" but everyone will know when the dust settles that these were the ones who made the right choice. They will be smeared and politicized but they will have to weather the storm.

I have faith in these people that they won't let their fellow colleagues be scared into giving a gargantuan chunk of change away to the people who caused this problem in the first place without their being an explicit explanation of how it will benefit those who are paying for it, the American tax payers.

I more than likely don't have a complete grasp on whats going on. There are things that I am aware of though. When someone doesn't have money to pay for debt, an American tax payer for example, he/she files for bankruptcy. This person's assets are chopped up into parts and sold as scrap. This person's life is basically ruined. The banks and lending institutions know this is a consequence, they lobbied for legislation making it harder for people to escape it in the first place (this is a factor in the housing crisis: it became cheaper for people to default on house mortgages then to declare bankruptcy. The banks had to take on the mortgages...which leads us to today!). So when I hear that these big companies and corporations are being bailed out with tax payer money it makes me think "well how come they don't do that for normal people?" They're so eager to give the money away to these companies but not back to the hard working people trying to live the "American Dream" (which includes owning a home...unless you can't pay your mortgage). I know that by handing these institutions a check we are, as a country, privatizing profit and socializing debt. That is a big problem. Very big.

Its hard to wrap my mind around it. Whos right and whos wrong? I don't know and I'm sure no one really knows. Its scary to think that the people running the show who are "in the know" probably "don't know" what their doing. Everything is a big experiment and I feel they have nothing to lose because there are no consequences for their actions. Its frustrating knowing that my future is in the hands of people conducting an experiment.

I say we let the institutions declare bankruptcy. The economy and free market will heal itself, over time without government intervention. As for the institutions, they are being investigated for fraud and illegal business practices by the FBI. Anyone reading into this should research the Great Depression (New Deal as well) and the Savings & Loans crisis of the 1980s & 90s (Keating 5). There are also various points in our history when banks and lending institutions were deregulated by the Federal government. I encourage you to look into that as well. It all has relevance to today's shitstorm.

I'll write more later, I'm tired.

[15^15] [Re]tail-told-lationships

As I briefly explained in class, our group chose to look at the program areas and create a relationship matrix. Now at first glance it might be interpreted as an adjacency diagram and you are partially correct in that assessment. The chart goes beyond area proximity being the only criteria: it includes all relationships possible. It should be noted that we did not look at the floor plan available to us nor did we design how the the areas interacted with each other. Quite honestly, that had nothing to do with what we were trying to accomplish. We simply discussed each critical area's relationship with all of the others. After this discussion we were able to narrow down the list for each area to what we thought were the most important relationships. This part is completely subjective and open to each group's own interpretation.

We felt this was an excellent way of breaking down the information on an individual level between the areas because the focus was on understanding the relationships and not on "space planning" or "laying out the space." Those phrases make me want to vomit.

Market [Re]search...

I'm sure everyone googled "shopping center types" and came across this (thanks to the American Studies Department at Eastern Connecticut University and the ICSC).

Regional malls: examples: Four Seasons, Southpoint, and Northlake.
Characteristics: department stores act as anchors (they even get their own entrances), dozens of smaller stores, food courts with wide selections of unhealthy meals, multi-story (two in these cases), parking lots that could support a city the size of Greensboro, multi-level main causeway circulation with multiple entrances and exits, multiple bathroom and utility access points (hidden away). I think this is something we're all pretty used to...next?

Airport Malls

The first picture is from an airport in Asia (not because there is an Asian man in the picture, give me some credit) and the second is from one in Dubai. Clearly, this would never work in the United States because of what happened on 9/11 and the subsequent Patriot acts that restricted movement in places like airports to people who were actually flying. I like the idea though, a "global mall." If you're an international hub or tourism hot spot like Dubai, why not throw a mall in your airport? I was reading the captions on some of the photos. There were wealthy Nigerians vactioning in Dubai that decided to buy three carts full of stuff in the local stores while they waited for their boarding call. It also cost them $3000 extra to put it all on the plane. Its a cool concept but it would never work in Greensboro (maybe after the Fedex Hub starts running 60 flights per night). Our airport has stores but we don't get anywhere near the volume of international (or national) traffic that Dubai, New York, Los Angelos, or London do. Anyway, the malls in airports look like normal regional malls except for all of the stuff you would expect at an airport.

Bazaars

It is interesting to note that the word"bazaar" originates from the Middle East from the Pahlavi word "baha-char" which means "places of prices." In the West it is most commonly referred to as a "flea market." The top image is from Tehran's Grand Bazaar (largest bazaar in the world) in Iran. I believe the bottom two bazaars are somewhere in Turkey. There are both long-term vendors with shops and short-term street stall vendors or perhaps the items in the street are a part of the store they are in front of (probably varies throughout). It appears as if the area is shielded from the environment (similar to an arcade which I will go over later) with a stone roof. Whether or not it is completely enclosed from the exterior is not something I'm knowledgable about. It looks like a very lively place...you'd never see a mall in America that crowded but unfortunately you would see the Greensboro Coliseum that crowded for the gun show. I know that because I went. Can you guess the primary demographic of the attendees? Hint: I fall into that category.

"....contains food, instruments, household goods, clothing, storytellers, books, and many other items, often sold by competing salespeople who attempt to win customers from each other with bidding and price wars....the layout and bargaining style have not changed dramatically in many centuries."<info> & <wiki>

Arcade

An Arcade is passage or walkway covered over by a succession of arches or vaults supported by columns with shops on one or both sides. The images below are from Burlington Arcade in London. While the area directly below the roof is protected from the elements, the passageway is still open to the exterior on both ends. After having done a little searching, I'm hypothesizing that arcades are potentially just bazaars for cultures with a higher standard of living (look at these examples). Arcades also share another similarity with bazaars. It seems that the circulation is tight as opposed to malls which have wide open spaces for people to traverse (Is it a cultural difference? The "mall" is a Western concept even though it has been adopted by developing nations in other parts of the world). Perhaps arcades are a response by cities like London to make use of available space and increase density within the city. Things to ponder, I suppose

Market

"Markets may be any of a variety of different systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby persons trade, and goods and services are exchanged, forming part of the economy. Markets vary in size, range, geographic scale, location, types and variety of human communities, as well as the types of goods and services traded." <wiki>

Looking at these four pictures, which ones are markets and which ones are bazaars? Well, the Western definition of a bazaar is a flea market (miscellaneous items of all kinds). While the second image could be considered a market, it is not a bazaar but the third image could be considered both a bazaar and a market. The first image was considered a market by its photographer and the fourth image labeled a bazaar. Confused? You want to know what else confuses me? Middle Eastern bazaars might as well be the less-fancy cousins of arcades in London and Melbourne (as I mentioned before). Is an arcade always a market? No (arcade without stalls and shops). Is a market always an arcade? No (if its not covered).

Conclusion: everything is cultural and even within one's culture the terminology is subjective.

As for Revolution Mills: I'll think about it tomorrow.

Revolution Mills Pictures...

Did I mention I like to take pictures? I probably could have spent an entire day and a few memory cards at that place. There was a ridiculous amount of content. I plan on going back when the weather is sunny, if they will allow me in. The clouds that day did not make for the best photo opportunity. I don't know how excited I am about what [they] are doing to renovate Revolution Mills but I will admit the place has character, as I hope it is portrayed in these photographs. Enjoy...

Lastly, it is unfortunate that the woman who was nice enough to give us the guided tour could not answer a seemingly easy question from Jami: "How are you preserving the history of the textile mill?" or something (good question). I suppose it was not safe for one to assume that this woman, a major player in Greensboro's relatively small historic preservation community representing Revolution Mills Studios and I'm sure whatever Greensboro's historic preservation society is, could simply inform us of how the textile mill's history was being preserved through the renovation (apparently with a wall of old photos). Huh? I must admit I was thrown off by the projectile vomited dry wall and tack-trad fixtures littering the premises. I believe she called it a "modern" look.

One word. Unbelievable.

Go figure.